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Worker-Student Solidarity Slams Columbia U’s Racist Exploitation
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- 28 November 2013 38 hits
NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — For the second year, Columbia University (CU) students have been organizing a group, Student Worker Solidaity (SWS), to support workers’ struggles on campus, and they are now beginning to explore racist and anti-worker aspects of CU’s expansion into West Harlem. Last year the students militantly agitated for workers at Barnard (the affiliated women’s college) and for employees of the faculty dining room, who were being miserably exploited by their respective administrations. Partial victories were won in both cases.
This year began with a campaign to lower the temperature in the sweltering kitchen of one of the dining halls. The University tried to claim that ventilating the kitchen would force a raise in tuition and that they had ascertained that students were not concerned about the issue. But SWS demonstrated in the dining hall, collected about a thousand signatures on a petition and confronted the administration, together with the workers. Given SWS’s history of mobilizing hundreds of students, the administration quickly gave in and took measures to cool off the kitchen.
Now SWS is planning to fight the injustices wrought by Columbia’s building a new campus on 33 acres. That land was previously occupied by small businesses and low-income housing for mostly black and Latino residents, all of which have been leveled. The unemployment rate in Harlem is near 50 percent for young black men. The average income is about $30,000, making paying unsubsidized rents impossible. Although Columbia promised jobs and monetary benefits to the community in compensation for lost jobs and housing, none of this has happened. The whole surrounding area is also being affected by gentrification, with landlords raising rents and forcing out low-income tenants to offer housing to students, faculty and other wealthier tenants attracted by the lure of Columbia.
Last week about 40 students joined a walking tour of the expansion area, where they heard from local housing organizers and a restaurant owner who was forced to move at great expense. They learned about Columbia’s plan to build a biohazard lab right on 125 Street. One older student related how a group of students and community residents had occupied 125 Street for five days in May, 2011, to protest the expansion. On the weekend, three students came to a conference against racist gentrification involving Harlem and Brooklyn tenants (see page 5).
SWS has now built alliances with several other campus groups who came to an expanded meeting to plan how to fight CU’s attack on its Harlem neighbors. They will build upon the research and struggles of smaller groups of students over the last several years and are aiming toward developing struggles relevant to jobs and housing. Some students have also been supporting the City College (CCNY) students who are fighting militarization and fascism on their campus. They attended the court hearing of two CCNY students who were arrested for fighting the closing of the political student organizing center on campus.
Several of the more left-wing students have begun to raise a broader political context in the group. It is important that the mostly well-off CU students do not simply see themselves as fighters against inequality from a moral point of view, but recognize that they are future workers, who will likely have difficulty finding employment and housing themselves. Capitalism is the cause of unemployment and increasing racism, fascism and war. The declining position of the U.S. in relation to China and others is making those problems more acute. It will take unity between low- and high-paid workers, men and women, citizens and non-citizens to have a chance of overthrowing this system and building an egalitarian communist society.
As of now, most students are taking CHALLENGE and some are meeting to discuss the ideas of communism and revolution. With hard work, many more will come to see the need for revolutionary change over the coming period as we engage in struggle together.
Newark, NJ — The struggle over education is sharpening in Newark. In a show of resistance to the Superintendent Cami Anderson’s rule, more than 1,500 education workers forced Anderson to close school for two days this month so they could attend the New Jersey Education Association’s annual convention.
The NJEA is the largest teachers union in the state. Nearly every New Jersey school district closes during the convention — except for Newark. When workers submitted forms to go to the convention, most principals were telling them not to go. Some even told the workers, “I will approve this on paper, but the superintendent told me to discourage workers from going.”
To support workers who have been harassed, more than 1,500 other education workers put in paperwork to go to the convention, forcing the superintendent to shut down Newark schools.
Teacher Action Exposes Racist Anderson
In an attempt to divide teachers and parents, Anderson sent out a letter blaming the teachers for closing school. The letter backfired. Anderson doesn’t realize that she won’t win parents over by implying their children are criminals. In an early draft of a letter, Anderson wrote that the workers’ action “forced us to once again close our doors, hurting schools and making our city less safe.”
Racism at the Heart of Attacks on Students and Teachers
Every now and then the working class gets a glimpse into the minds of the ruling class and its foot soldiers. Anderson rose through the ranks of Teach For America, the New York City Public School System, and the Broad Superintendents Academy. Her allegiance is to the capitalist class. She had already shut down a number of schools and cut $56 million from the budget last year. She has spent millions more pushing the common core curriculum.
Anderson’s policies show that the main contradiction within public education is between the capitalist class and the students. For the last three decades, the ruling class had less of a need for black and Latino workers. As jobs were sent overseas, prisons and schools became the holding cells for many of these young people. Anderson’s language exposes the bosses’ conversion of schools into warehouses for youth who are marginalized by capitalism. But as the bosses need to win a new generation of students to fight in inter-imperialist wars and to work for low wages, they may need to change their strategy.
It’s Not Just Anderson —It’s Capitalism
From the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century until now, schools have been organized to meet the changing economic, political, and social needs of the capitalist class. The current situation in Newark is no different. The Newark Teachers Union and Newark Student Union and a number of community groups are fighting back against Anderson and her boss, Governor Chris Christie. But getting rid of Anderson or Christie won’t stop the assault on students and education workers. From the U.S. to Mexico to England, attacks on workers are escalating as bosses prepare for a wider war. As we struggle with students, parents, and teachers to fight for communism, PLP has the opportunity to give the working class the political education it needs to create a communist world.
It’s important to take note of the increase in class struggle around the world — but it’s also important to understand that without communist ideas, it can’t lead to the end of capitalism and the racism, sexism and exploitation that feed it. As communists, we must be totally entrenched in the working class and the class struggle, put forward our communist ideas and win workers and students to them.
That’s not always easy when bosses, especially the liberals and so-called “progressives” like New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, talk as if they want to make life better for the working class. But de Blasio’s “reform” agenda with talk about NYC being a “tale of two cities” with a huge “income inequality” between rich and poor may sound appealing, but they are deceptive. They really want to preserve capitalism so the big capitalists can further their economic and military goals in the world. Their “tale of two cities” approach is meant to pacify the working class and freeze it between having false hopes and being hopeless.
For example, low-rent housing in NYC is disappearing rapidly. In working-class neighborhoods such as Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn and others in the South Bronx. Real estate interests and bankers, as well as small, parasitic landlords lurking in their shadows, are kicking out working-class tenants, raising rents and rezoning areas for luxury high-rise housing. They use racist lies and slander to justify this, claiming that too much low-rent housing in an area makes it “undesirable,” or that black and Latino working families are “too noisy,” and more.
So, what is de Blasio’s proposal to achieve “housing equality?” Provide 200,000 new low-rent apartments in NYC over the next 10 years. That’s not even a drop in the bucket! A few hundred units in working-class neighborhoods every year, in a city of millions! Help for only a handful of workers and forget the rest. Then the politicians and their allies in unions and community non-profits will proclaim “Victory!”
Why do communists in PLP talk about fighting for “egalitarianism,” rather than reducing the gap between rich and poor? Because reducing the gap means there would still be rich capitalists, and they would still make their money on the backs of the working class. Under communism, we will organize society according to workers’ needs — from each according to commitment, to each according to need. With no bosses to make profits from dividing us, we will also be able to destroy racism and sexism.
New York City, November 15 — The fight against militarization and repression at City University of New York (CUNY) is drawing more students and faculty into action. Today a strategy meeting that organizers thought might draw 50, instead brought 120 people to four hours of intense talk about every aspect of the CUNY struggle. There were many new faces: an energetic group of undergrads and grad students along with professors, both veterans and young adjuncts.
Progressive Labor Party members were among the organizers. Participants distributed CHALLENGE and got to know several new fighters. Many are making up their minds about their basic political outlook, including Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary communist ideas.
The majority are outraged at CUNY’s suppression of resistence on campus and its welcome to General “Drones” Petraeus and ROTC. While jobs evaporate, CUNY continues its racist dumbing down of curriculum combined with rising tuition and student debt. It is a fluid moment when militants are looking for the best path ahead, as capitalism exposes its contradictions and failures.
Petraeus, ROTC =Militarization
The hiring of Petraeus and the return of ROTC have reminded all how the universities are tied to the military and the ruling class. The campus is not exempt from the intensifying racist police oppression, especially in the black and Latino communities from which most of our students come.
In one small breakout group, four grad student adjuncts were there because they thought it was time they got involved. One was angry at the raid by the City College Administration on the students’ Morales/Shakur Center and the arrest of two protest leaders. One had been excited by the Occupy Wall St. movement and was looking to apply it to CUNY. Two others had been active as undergrads but not yet at CUNY until the issue of militarization brought them to this event. These four show the potential for growth in this movement, and of the communist movement.
The group included union fighters and chapter leaders. One told the newcomers how her campus chapter had just met and agreed on an awareness campaign of union tabling outside the cafeteria about campus worker unity and opposing militarization and repression. Another described the antiwar committee just formed on campus, combining chapter militants and students.
A PL’er stressed that militarization on the campus reflected imperialist war preparations by the ruling class, and that the international working class had to prepare for the next big war on the horizon. He said that the struggle against war and the militarization of society had to be international, and mentioned as examples the letters of solidarity with CUNY students from comrades in Haiti and the students at UNAM in Mexico City.
How To Teach Students the Truth
The small-group discussion then focused on how we could use the classroom to make more students aware of militarization. A math teacher said he couldn’t teach politics in a math class, but a German historian told us how under the Nazis math lessons were politicized, with examples and problems reinforcing fascist propaganda. A biochemist also couldn’t see how to teach politics in a science class, but someone noted the recruiting of the chemical industry for war and weaponry, the recruitment of health workers for the military’s detention/torture centers, or scientific war research on campus.
A philosophy lecturer said he couldn’t ethically teach students his own politics because it would be taking advantage of his position of authority over them. One response to that common faculty view said students are already bombarded by capitalist ideas from the curriculum and all the bosses’ media.
As a comrade passed the hat for students’ legal costs, the whole group resolved to build for the court appearance of two CCNY students on Nov. 19 (see page 8), and a protest at the CUNY Board of Trustees on Nov. 25 (see front page). While we didn’t agree on all our ideas, we nevertheless agreed to intensify our actions in the face of intimidation by the cops and the Administration.
PLP did disagree with the majority on the reformist demand to abolish the Board of Trustees appointed by the Mayor and Governor and to elect our own Board to run the university in our own interests (the student-power, faculty-power idea). Most unionists know from experience that bosses will never allow workers this kind of control. Only one class at a time can hold state power.
PL believes that the capitalists run every institution including universities (public and private) to serve their class interests for profit and social control. They will never surrender control to students and faculty in a school or college, to health workers and patients in a hospital, to workers in a factory, field, mine, or office, or to rank-and-file soldiers.
They run a racist, sexist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the whole society, while maintaining the illusion of popular democracy through elections (elections like that of their latest darling Bill De Blasio, determined by their money and their media). But you can’t elect the boss of a factory or a mine or a hospital or a college or an army.
PL sees the campus not as a place where students and faculty can wrest power from the bosses, but as a site of class struggle where students and faculty — in a worker-student alliance — can link their own fights to the struggles of the whole working class. We can help build a revolutionary movement for the working class to take state power and construct an alternative, boss-free communist society in which education is ours to remake and wars for profit are history.
International Workers’ Unity Crucial
Want to end militarization? Fight for international communism. Join PLP. CUNY students, faculty and staff active now should join with workers’ strikes and community battles against racist police, with teachers in Mexico, with students in Haiti, miners in South Africa and textile workers in Bangladesh. Our comrades at CUNY have always stood for this view, from the 1930s until now.
Students have often initiated important struggles at CUNY and need to again. But workers led by communists have the numbers and the potential power to finish them — everywhere the war clouds threaten — as a single international class. As critical, radical students and faculty, we must begin to see ourselves as part of that class.
Brooklyn, NY November 21 — In the bustling center of Church Avenue, as hundreds of working-class people poured out of the subway station on their way home from work, they were greeted by a militant demonstration demanding “Justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn jail cell.”
The demonstration included a broad spectrum of the working class, up to 130 people assembled in militant unity to demand justice for this kkkop murder. The group was black, Latino, Asian, white, men, women, and children to mark the fourth-month anniversary of the murder of Kyam Livingston.
Kyam was a 37-year-old black single mother and worker who was arrested and was waiting for arraignment in Brooklyn Central Booking. She was complaining of extreme stomach pain and crying out for help. The KKKops callously ignored her cries, saying, “Shut the f*** up or we’ll lose your paperwork.” Kyam died in continued agony to the horror of the other women in the holding cell.
‘You’re Not Gonna Hide This’
Kyam’s mother was the first speaker and cried for justice for her daughter. In her anguish, she proclaimed that there would be justice to the cops standing there, sending chills up the spines of the collected gathering. Her speech was a note for militancy and a promise that justice would be done for her daughter. “Your’e not gonna hide this, “ she cried.
A black working-class student spoke of the need for multiracial unity in the fight against police brutality and racism. A PLP high school teacher and a member of the Justice for Shantel Davis committee made a call to smash this racist, murderous system that will continue to kill our children. “Only we can stop it,” he said. He pointed out how the kkkops are used as a tool for the bosses to separate the working class — black from white, and men from women.
A parent from a faith-based community spoke of his concern for his black children who clearly are not safe under this system. He said, “As long as Kyam’s family needs me, I’ll be here.” A union member and fighter who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years described how the comunity should create a wall of unity so that no more murders of our children will take place. He also honored the bravery of the Livingston family, especially of Kyam’s mother. A young man of about 12 took the microphone and said that he knew Kyam. She was a good person. He misses her, and he called for “Justice for Kyam Livingston.”
‘We Want The Names. We Want The Tapes!’
The chanting was militant, vigorous and forceful, “Justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn cell,” “We want the names. We want the tapes,” and “Kyam Livingston means — fight back!” “Police murders mean — fight back!” ”No justice,no peace. No racist police.”
The final speaker called for a march down Church Avenue so that the neighborhood could be as one with the march and the multi-racial nature of the marchers.
Crowds of people stopped and listened to the speeches and chants. Many made comments such as, “You got that right!” and “We’re hearing the truth here!” Kyam’s mother lives in that neighborhood and is well known and well loved. Her neighbors and friends stopped and joined the demonstration. Many people came up to her, greeted and hugged her. A young woman from a downtown Brooklyn church who participated in the demonstration said, “This is great. This is real unity.”
CHALLENGES and many leaflets were distributed.Many protesters said, “next time I’ll try to bring more of my friends.“ The next demonstraton will be on the afternoon of Saturday, December 21st. There will be no end to this struggle until we have smashed racism and capitalism.